Lewis Pyenson speaks to Medievalism Class

On Thursday, July 16, Dr. Lewis Pyenson, Dean of the WMU Graduate College, presented a visiting lecture to the participants in Richard Utz's Graduate Seminar on Studies in Medievalism. Pyenson sketched a panoramic picture of the changing views on medieval culture from the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism through Postmodernism, focusing on the history of ideas and the medievalism of several seminal modernist scholars, e.g., Henri Pirenne, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Henri de Man, and George Sarton.

Queer Movie Medievalism

About to be published with Ashgate: Kathleen Coyne Kennedy and Tison Pugh, eds., Queer Movie Medievalism.

Here is the publisher's description: How is history even possible, since it involves recapturing a past already lost? It is through this urge to understand, feel and experience, that films based on medieval history are made. They attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality leading to the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism. "Queer Movie Medievalisms" is the first book of its kind to grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present, as registered on the silver screen, queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time. It will be of great interest to scholars of Gender and Sexuality, Cultural and Media Studies, Film Studies and Medieval History.

Contents: Introduction: queer history, cinematic medievalism, and the impossibility of sexuality, Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh; The law of the daughter: queer family politics in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Béatrice, Lisa Manter; Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on stage and screen, R. Barton Palmer; 'He's not a ardent suitor, is he, brother?': Richard the Lionheart's ambiguous sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades (1935), Lorraine Kochanske Stock; 'In the company of orcs': Peter Jackson's queer Tolkein, Jane Chance; The Eastern Western: camp as a response to cultural failure in The Conqueror, Anna Klosowska; 'In my own idiom': social critique, campy gender, and queer performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Susan Aronstein; Performance, camp, and queering history in Luc Besson's Jeanne d'Arc, Susan Hayward; Sean Connery's star persona and the queer Middle Ages, Tison Pugh; Will Rogers' pink spot: A Connecticut Yankee (1931), Kathleen Coyne Kelly; Danny Kaye and the 'fairy tale' of queerness in The Court Jester, Martha Bayless; Mourning and sexual difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberbergs's Parsifal, Michelle Bolduc; Superficial medievalism and the queer futures of film, Cary Howie; Afterword, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger.

Scala's Posthistorical Middle Ages

Liz Scala and Sylvia Federico have recently published an essay collection of great interest to scholars of medievalism, The Post-Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The publisher's summary reads: "This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. Analyzing the legacy of Marxist and materialist theory on medieval literary criticism, the collection offers new ways of reading texts historically. Drawing upon aesthetic, ethical, and cultural vantage points and methods, these essays demonstrate that a variety of approaches and theories are “historical” and can change what it means to historicize medieval literature. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself."
Table of Contents: Introduction--Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala * Amorous Dispossessions: Knowledge, Desire, and the Poet’s Dead Body--Patricia Clare Ingham * Time Out of Memory--Jeffrey J. Cohen * Historicism after Historicism--Maura Nolan * (Dis)Continuity: The History of Dreaming--Aranye Fradenburg * Recovering the Middle Ages?--Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg * Naked Chaucer--George Edmondson * Biography After Historicism--Daniel Birkholz * The Gender of Historicism--Elizabeth Scala * From Clio to JHMuse©: Literacy and the Muse Of Digitalia--R. Allen Shoaf

Verduin speaks to wmu medievalism class

Kathleen Verduin, one of the most experienced practitioners of medievalism, Associate Editor of Studies in Medievalism from 1982 to 1998 and Professor of American Literature at Hope College, recently led a workshop on Medievalism and the American Renaissance at the graduate seminar on "Studies in Medievalism" at Western Michigan University. Participants were able to learn about the genesis of medievalism as an academic specialty area and discuss the views on medieval culture expressed by famous Americans from William Bradford through Walt Whitman.

SIM conference deadline extended

The deadline for the fall Studies in Medievalism conference has been extended to August 1rst. The CFP and other information for the conference can be found at the Studies in Medievalism web site. Once again, the dates are October 8-10, at Siena College near Albany, New York, and this year's theme is "Medievalism and Religion."